Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose / Edition 1

by Mick Short

Overview

Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose examines how readers interact with literary works, how they understand and are moved by them. Mick Short considers how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carying out stylistic analysis of poetry, drama and prose fiction in turn. He analyses a wide range of extracts from English literature, adopting an accessible approach to the analysis of literary texts which can be applied easily to other texts in English and in other languages.

This volume provides a clear and broad-ranging introduction to stylistic analysis - the first to cover all three literary genres in detail. The introduction provides a very useful overview of stylistics as a whole and discusses the links between linguistics and literary criticism. Detailed analysis of each genre follows, with exercises designed to develop ideas further. There is also extended discussion of the exercises and suggestions for further readings for those interested in carrying out their own stylistic analyses. A particularly useful feature of the book is the series of checksheets of style features to look for when analysing texts, which occur at the ends of chapters. This study will be of particular interest to undergraduate students interested in stylistic analysis and the accounts of up-to-date analytical methods will also be relevant to advanced students and researchers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780582291300
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/19/1996
Series:	Learning about Language Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mick Short is a senior lecturer in the department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University. He co-authored Style in Fiction (Longman, 1981) with Geoffrey Leech and is the editor of Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature (Longman, 1989). He is also the founder of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and the founding editor of its international journal Language and Literature.

Table of Contents

Preface: how to use this bookAuthor's acknowledgementsPublisher's acknowledgements 1. Who is stylistics? 2. More on foregrounding, deviation and parallelism 3. Style variation in texts 4. Sound, meaning and effect 5. Rhythm and metre in the reading of poetry 6. Drama: the conversational genre 7. The meaning of speech acts, turn-taking and politeness 8. Assumptions, presuppositions and the inferring of meaning 9. Fictional prose and point of view 10. Speech and thought presentation 11. Prose style 12. Bringing it all together Appendix: a list of English phonemes References Index